Marcus Castro and Maximilian Stengel met while studying a master's degree in business administration (MBA) at the Barcelona business school Esade. The entrepreneurial desire of these two financial experts led them to study the university market after having detected a market opportunity in it: the need to guide students in their professional careers. After verifying the existence of this need, as well as the viability of the business, in a few months they formed the startup CareerOS, in January 2023. Oleksii Reshetnik and Dan Neciu, who have more technological profiles, were added to the founding team.
“We offer students a space in which to develop their professional careers,” explains Castro. “We put the students at the center. Everything we do is focused on them,” adds Stengel. With CareerOS, the co-founders guide the university students so that they can build relationships with the human resources managers of the employing companies, while the universities obtain information in real time about the contacts that their students are making, which provides teachers with the data necessary to support the results of their students.
CareerOS customers are not students, but universities. Currently, the startup works with ten educational centers, including Esade, the French HEC Paris, the German WHU and the University of Maryland (United States), among others. For this year, the entrepreneurs want to attract 40 more centers and end the year with fifty universities in their portfolio. The European Union and the United States are its main markets.
Based in Barcelona and a team of 15 employees, the startup has closed a pre-seed financing round of just over 1.1 million euros. The capital injection has had the support of a group of investors including academics –Jan Brinckmann, Dietmar Grichnik and Luis Vives–, experts in human resources technology –Stefan Menden and Marvin Homburg–, entrepreneurs and executives –Michael Wolfe (founder of Gladly) and Daniel Holz (former SAP and current vice president of Google Cloud in Northern Europe) – the SuperAngels fund and the Vimajo family office.
CareerOS has participated in Esade's eWorks business creation program. The entrepreneurs explain that they chose Barcelona as their headquarters because of its powerful entrepreneurial ecosystem.
